10 past midnight

Please join me in welcoming Wood Dickinson today to crimsonleague.com!

Wood is an award-winning filmmaker at renegade Pictures. Today he’s going to discuss a topic as applicable to novels as it is to screenplays: how to develop an idea, and the importance of research to our writing and our creativity.

This post is one of the longer guest posts I’ve featured, but it’s well worth the read!

Recently I was faced with answering the question, “What is an idea?”

I was working with a first time writer, trying desperately to teach him about the formation of an idea. He told me he had tons of ideas and thought he could write movie scripts and make movies like crazy.

After a painful few weeks, I decided to show–not tell–this would-be writer what an idea really looks like. Here’s what I did and said.

“What you call an idea is really just…